In 1910, Carrie Nation, the legendary and fiery figure of the women’s temperance movement, arrived in a buggy outside of the Pastime Bar on Main Street in Kalispell to exchange heated words with the saloon owner. Nation was famous for wielding a hatchet, using it to smash bottles of booze that she felt created a crisis of alcoholism, poverty, and domestic violence across the country. August Heller, known as Gus, the Jewish son of German immigrants, was the proprietor of the saloon, a bar known for its imported wines from California and aged whiskey from the previous century. Heller was also famous for having the recently founded city’s first concrete sidewalk outside his establishment. It’s unknown if Nation packed her hatchet to destroy the bar; however, there is a record of a blast of heated words exchanged between the woman on a mission to stop the sale of alcohol from denigrating society.
Nation accused Heller of evil, including suspicions of promoting prostitution; one historian recounts that Heller responded by calling the anti-alcohol crusader a “grafter.”
At the time of Nation’s arrival, the town was less than 20 years old. Kalispell became a townsite with the routing of the Great Northern Railroad’s transcontinental line in 1891. Despite being one of the last areas in the Lower 48 to be developed after the forceful removal of Native Americans from their traditional homelands to reservations, Kalispell garnered an unusual amount of attention, and not just for its number of bars and houses of ill-repute. The building that once occupied Heller’s saloon still stands on the first block of downtown and is now connected at all points via concrete sidewalks and asphalt roads. It houses a home and gift store called Modern Pastime. The two-story brick building still bears the original name, Pastime, emblazoned above the current occupant’s front door.
The story of the radical activist Carrie Nation berating barkeep Gus Heller is one of the many tales shared along the NW Montana History Museum’s new walking history tour. Launched last May, the tour, titled “The Iron Horse Snorted in the Garden of Eden,” is devoted to the formation of Kalispell in 1891 and its downtown architecture — a brick-and-mortar portrait of a town that endured many cycles of booms and busts, which transformed the city into a regional hub for economic growth, government, transportation, and culture.
The NW Montana History Museum, housed in the city’s oldest public building, built as the Central School in 1894, hosts interactive and ADA-accessible tours from the end of May through September. According to Margaret Davis, the museum’s executive director, the walking tour was the culmination of the previous museum director’s project and countless hours — many of them logged by volunteers — of research, planning, and development. In its inaugural year, 250 individuals participated, and Davis reported an almost even mix of tourists and residents. The two-hour walking tour covers about one mile in distance and highlights the people and businesses in the downtown corridor that contributed to Kalispell’s early formation. “The Iron Horse Snorted in the Garden of Eden” tour program is led by Bruce Guthrie, a former high school teacher and historian who’s lived in Kalispell since 1997. The title of the tour references an 1892 advertisement from the Kalispell Graphic, a 19th-century newspaper, in which the Flathead Valley was depicted as Montana’s Eden, with the railroad ushering in a modern era of industry as it tracked westward to the Pacific.
Originally from the Chicago area and the son of a German immigrant, Guthrie reveled at the chance to lead the immersive walking tour, sifting through the museum’s extensive collection of records, photographs, and materials to help him craft a meaningful program that focuses on how Kalispell grew out of the original Demersville outpost on the north end of Flathead Lake to become a booming town, a gateway to Glacier National Park and the regional center of banks, bars, shops, and schools. As an admirer of architecture, Guthrie uses the town’s distinct buildings to highlight the many different people who contributed to the city’s development.
“The bones of our downtown are tremendous,” he recently said while walking along Main Street and having me search for a ghost sign above the cobalt blue Coins and Carats awning.
The nearly imperceptible traces of hand-painted signs or illustrations on old buildings serve as ghost signs and, in Kalispell’s downtown corridor, they are ubiquitous. Guthrie enjoys revealing their location to participants on his tour, who often skip over the faded lettering of bygone institutions like Glacier Photography, the studio belonging to the renowned visual artist T.J. Hileman. Hileman was known for his images of Glacier National Park and would become the official photographer for the Great Northern Railroad. According to Guthrie, Hileman’s pre-World War II photographs of the newly created national park and the surrounding Flathead Valley is “an unparalleled body of work.”
Guthrie, who lives on the east side of Kalispell and works part-time at Rocky Mountain Outfitter, another building of historical importance, has long been drawn to history. He cites his mother’s influence on his curiosity, helping him to understand the world around him. His mother came of age in Germany during World War II and her formal education ended at age 16. She influenced Guthrie’s passion for history and comprehension, even making a movie an opportunity to learn more about the actors and filmmakers who created the work of art. That laid the foundation for Guthrie’s lifelong interest in history and storytelling. He continues to teach history, with a particular focus on America’s Civil War era at Flathead Valley Community College.
“Growing up,” he said of his childhood, “in every interaction, there was something to learn, to be conscious of.”
At 59 years old, Guthrie clearly still recalls seeing, at the age of 7, Independence Hall in Philadelphia, Pa., and how that experience made a lasting impression. History isn’t a dulled or dead topic, confined to static displays or the pages of an outdated textbook. It’s alive and ever-present, an opportunity for him to find connections between things. “For the pure sake of joy. I find joy in it,” he said.
Part of the pleasure of serving as a tour guide, Guthrie said, is sharing the personal histories of the people who built Kalispell, including Frank Brinkman. A 1912 graduate of Flathead High School, Brinkman worked as an architect for 40 years and no other figure matched Brinkman’s influence on the town’s physical appearance. “Any significant building built in Kalispell between 1922 and 1952 came out of Fred Brinkman’s office,” Guthrie explained as we wandered down First Avenue East. “The neat thing about the Fred Brinkman style is there’s no Fred Brinkman style. You’re going to see his buildings all over town and I’ll tell you that it’s a Fred Brinkman and it won’t look anything like the other Fred Brinkman buildings you saw.”
Brinkman is responsible for designing the Art Nouveau style shop at 222 Main Street, built in 1941 as a women’s apparel store, the Montgomery Ward Store on the end of the third block of Main, the Strand Theater across from the Central School, and the City of Kalispell Water Department, which is now the city attorney’s office. More than a dozen of his buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Buildings and his extensive portfolio also contains several buildings at the Montana State University campus and the Symes Hotel in Hot Springs, southwest of Kalispell. Brinkman died in Flathead County in 1961. During the tour, Guthrie highlights the distinct architectural details Brinkman integrated into his unique buildings, many of which are only noticeable with the help of a local guide and at an enjoyable pedestrian pace.
The wealth of information Guthrie can share about Kalispell’s development, aided by the Hellgate Treaty of 1855, forced Indigenous populations onto the Flathead Indian Reservation, which opened the area to entrepreneurs like Charles Conrad and created a pathway for the railroad and subsequent generations of development, is more than can be shared in one tour. One of the tour program’s goals was to share the wide range of resources the museum houses and to bring it to life along the busy streets of the town at the cusp of another population boom cycle. “I think any institution should always be diversifying its offerings,” Davis, the museum’s executive director, said about the relevance of the history museum and its ability to reach a wider and more diverse audience.
Davis, with longtime ties to the Flathead Valley, said the tour bolstered her sense of pride in Kalispell’s endurance, especially after it was dealt a major blow when the railroad moved north to Whitefish in 1904, jeopardizing the city’s growth and status as the county seat. “It’s a reminder of the generations of hard work and resilience,” she said.
Guthrie finds Kalispell’s history — which is relatively recent compared to the rest of the country’s — and endless source of fascination. It also provides him with an opportunity to share what he’s learned over the years and the chance to increase that knowledge with every encounter. “It’s amazing how alive this all is. Just find an older person and ask them: what do you remember about growing up in Kalispell?”
Perhaps Guthrie will discover if Carrie Nation had kept her bar-smashing hatchet when she faced off against Gus Heller.
“The Iron Horse Snorted in the Garden of Eden” tour occurs every Monday at 10 a.m. from May 27 through Sept. 30. Tours begin and end at the NW Montana History Museum and are approximately two hours in length. Tickets are required and include admission to the museum. Pricing is available for adults, seniors, students, veterans, and kids. The recommended age is 10 and up. Private tours are also available. Tickets can be reserved online or phone (406) 756-8381.
More information is available online at: www.nwmthistory.org/programs/downtown-kalispell-walking-tour/